Minister Frances Fitzgerald says miscarriages are 'marked in my memory'

The Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald has said that the subject of miscarriage remains a huge taboo in Ireland, particularly for younger couples.

Speaking in an interview with the Irish Examiner, Minister Fitzgerald revealed that she had suffered two miscarriages before giving birth to her second and third child.

“They are marked in my memory. I remember going into the hospital and being told and then the shock. The whole thing around it,” she said.

It is estimated that up to 14,000 women in Ireland suffer from a miscarriage each year, and Minister Fitzgerald said that attitudes have changed over the years.

“I think an older generation, my mother’s generation, thought this was the natural order whereas now, people don’t think it is the natural order; they think it is dreadful,” said Ms Fitzgerald.

“A lot of people are having miscarriages at older age because they want to have babies at an older age, so it is more stressful, then they think: " 'Am I going to get pregnant again?' "

She recalled women who lost their babies in hospitals having to suffer the trauma of being placed in wards beside women who had successfully delivered.

“People who miscarried were put in wards with people who had just had babies, so it is very hard,” she said.

However, Ms Fitzgerald added that giving birth to her second and third child helped to put her miscarriages in perspective to some degree.

“For me, I went on to have a second and a third pregnancy afterward, so you can recover from it. And you can kind of accept, well there was something wrong and there is a reason for it,” she said.

The Dublin Mid-West TD said the entire issue of miscarriage is “tremendously sensitive”  and that helping women was one of the key reasons she entered politics.